Erik Fredner

@fredner.org

282

Followers

225

Following

Posts

- Postdoc at the University of Virginia
- Digital humanities
- US literatures C19-20
- https://fredner.org

Posts Replies Media

Also known as “training your replacement.” 😩

Morehouse to be the first university to use virtual AI teaching assistantswww.axios.com The Atlanta HBCU will have AI teaching assistants this fall.

Today, the NYT announced that they will be publishing their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century in batches from July 8-12. Curious what people who study contemporary literature would bet on making the list before it's published. My bets below…  www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/b... 1/7

Sign Up to Learn the Best Books of the 21st Centurywww.nytimes.com Starting on July 8, we’ll unveil a list of 100. Make sure you’re among the first to find out.

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

Poetry is weirdly prominent in LLM conversations. But what do models really "know" about poetry? We tested how well LLMs can recognize 20+ poetic forms in English & probed major pretraining datasets to see which poems might be memorized. New preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2406.18906

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

YAYYYY gothamist.com/news/nyc-lib...

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

I’m really impressed by llama3 in ollama for Humanities applications. Thinking of adding a prompt collection to aiforhumanists.com, would people contribute?

New piece by Joe Karaganis about Open Syllabus, which analyzes fields of study by using co-assignment of core texts on syllabi as a proxy. I use and reference Open Syllabus data all the time. Shout out to the OS Galaxy creator @dclure.bsky.social! www.publicbooks.org/galaxy-brain/

Galaxy Brainwww.publicbooks.org The university doesn’t solve the problem of the fragmentation of knowledge into specialties so much as administer it.

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

these basic facts about every online platform out there are also the explanation for "but everyone on my timeline hates this change, why did the site do it". No matter who is on your timeline, they are massive outliers just by dint of posting enough to be on your timeline.

Fun fact: the median bluesky user has made 7 posts, and is followed by one person. The mean number of posts per user is 96. Only 323,532 out of 5,950,015 users have posted more than 10o times. bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Atlas - Engagement-Based Social Graph for Bluesky by Jaz (jaz.bsky.social) bsky.jazco.dev

Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." www.chronicle.com/article/will...

Will Republicans Save the Humanities?www.chronicle.com Colleges in red and purple states have been going on a hiring spree.

The transition from "balanced literacy" to "the science of reading" in NYC has involved subscriptions to curricula by companies like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that direct students away from full texts and toward extracts more similar to 19th century "readers:" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Bookswww.theatlantic.com “It didn’t even feel like learning.”

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

Thanks to the NEH, ACH and RRCHNM are pleased to be able to offer (14) $2000 bursaries to support attendance of members and the US DH community at DH 2024. Applications are due July 1, 2024 and awardees will be notified by July 10. Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

DH 2024 Bursariesdocs.google.com Deadline for Applications: July 1, 2024 Notification by July 10, 2024 With the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and...

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

"Investing political hours—and public dollars—in low-carbon leisure helps cultivate interconnected communities, rebuild the political imagination, and grow a new political base—not to mention helping people survive the climate crisis." lfg!! prospect.org/sponsored/th...

Why We Should Care About Low-Carbon Leisureprospect.org Investments in tangible spaces for leisure can increase connection and fun activities while reducing carbon emissions.

PSA for anyone else struggling to upload your paper in a way that the @dh2024.bsky.social convalidator will accept: The Word template didn't work for me. But LibreOffice with the .ODT template did. #DH2024

Me: ok don't move you're so cute Cat: *yawns*

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

📚 Attention Readers & Researchers More than 500,000 books have been removed from our lending library due to the publishers' lawsuit. Have you been affected? Share your story with us and help us fight to restore access. #LetReadersRead 👉 forms.gle/G2GXK6xwMZ3t...

Share Your Story: The Impact of Losing Access to 500,000 Booksforms.gle The publishers' lawsuit against the Internet Archive (Hachette v. Internet Archive) has resulted in the removal of more than 500,000 books from our lending library, including over 1,300 banned and cha...

85% of teens have iPhones. [1] 59% of college students say they use generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) at least monthly. [2] This fall, those two numbers will be the same. (And it will be more than monthly.) [1] www.pipersandler.com/sites/defaul... [2] tytonpartners.com/time-for-cla... 1/4

Time for Class 2024tytonpartners.com Time for Class 2024 identifies gaps in digital learning in higher education with data gathered from 3,000+ admins, instructors, and students.

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

Trying to design an undergrad assignment using Harvard Library charging records. That all those records are digitized feels miraculous: a treasure trove! But, sadly, the students will rebel at being asked to read cursive. Anyhow, here, for ex, is what Agassiz was borrowing in summer 1860.

Pollsters are simulating political surveys with AI because nobody answers the phone: ash.harvard.edu/articles/usi... "The big difference between humans and AI agents is that the AI agents always pick up the phone..."

Using AI for Political Polling – Ash Centerash.harvard.edu

If you don't want AI stuff in your Google results, you can turn it off. Instructions: tenbluelinks.org

How to Turn Off Google AI Overview and Set "Web" as Defaulttenbluelinks.org

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

We're delighted to announce a new future for Ursula's home in Portland, Oregon. The Le Guin family will donate the house to Literary Arts as a site for the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency. apnews.com/article/ursu...

Ursula K. Le Guin's home will become a writers residencyapnews.com The former home of the late Ursula K. Le Guin is being readied to become a base for contemporary authors.

Govts including India, Japan, Singapore, UAE, and Canada plan to make LLMs based on citizens’ data in part *to protect national culture* "The goal: to develop AI locally and train large language models in their native languages, based on their own citizens’ data..." www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvid... 1/

"There's a certain Slant of light"

Further evidence for visual culture putting text to rout: "Young people, especially, are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on TikTok and other social media." www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/b...

English-Language Books Are Filling Europe’s Bookstores. Mon Dieu!www.nytimes.com Young people, especially, are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on TikTok and other social media.

Hot take: Humanists should care about reading statistics. The UK National Literacy Trust's annual literacy survey found a 26% decline in daily reading among 8-18 year olds between 2005 (38.1% of respondents reported reading daily) and 2023 (28.0%). literacytrust.org.uk/research-ser... 1/2

Children and Young People's Reading Research Report 2023 | National Literacy Trust | National Literacy Trustliteracytrust.org.uk Discover the findings from our recent research report about children and young people's reading in 2023 based on our Annual Literacy Survey.

A play in two acts:

Viet Thanh Nguyen on the relationship between literary best-of lists, literary merit, and exclusion: wapo.st/3RcD4xQ (Including a shout-out to work by @alexandermanshel.bsky.social and @mellymeldubs.bsky.social!)

How the first National Book Awards reflected 1950s Americawapo.st In the start of a new series reflecting on 75 years of the awards, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about how societies and juries read and recognize literature

Recently learned that Edgar Rice Burroughs—creator of Tarzan and famous eugenicist—tried to publish his first short story under the pseudonym NORMAL BEAN. Presumably, this literary device would convince his readers that the writer had a phrenologically-ok head. 1/2

OpenAI just announced a new service called "ChatGPT Edu," which they describe as "an affordable offering for universities to responsibly bring AI to campus." “Affordable,” famously, does not mean $0. 1/2

- Successful literary debuts today require some level of pre-existing celebrity, typically amassed on and measured through social media. - Kerouac's "On the Road" is a plausible origin for this kind of debut. - Which means that Jack Kerouac is the original "literary It girl"

Loved chatting with Kate Dwyer about the debut novel for ESQUIRE! www.esquire.com/entertainmen...

Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?www.esquire.com For first-time writers, it’s harder than ever to break out. That poses an existential crisis for publishing—and disturbing limits on your access to exciting new voices.

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

A ton of folks at the CDH & incredible graduate students in Princeton English have worked for SO LONG on this project -- please read & share! modernismmodernity.org/forums/world... Especially excited about @zoeleblanc.bsky.social and @suttonkoeser.bsky.social's article.

The World of Shakespeare and Company | Modernism / Modernity Print+modernismmodernity.org This cluster is co-published in collaboration with The Journal of Cultural Analytics. I What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? The story of Shakespeare and Company has been told and retold—by Beach herself in Shakespeare and Company (1959) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010), by Noël Riley Fitch in

Reposted by

Erik Fredner

My department (English, Toronto Metropolitan University) is hiring a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities! I'm not on the hiring committee, but v. excited that this hire was approved. Happy to chat informally about the dept, uni, city, etc. hr.cf.torontomu.ca/ams/faculty/...

Career Opportunitieshr.cf.torontomu.ca